In praise of ... Gibson Square

Last weekend's firebomb attack on the house of an independent publisher which is about to publish a novel about the relationship between the prophet Muhammad and his first wife Aisha has rightly been condemned by leading British writers. The book, The Jewel of Medina, came to Gibson Square only after it was dropped by Random House. This mainstream publisher had sent the novel to academics for approval, and one of them, Denise Spellberg, accused the author Sherry Jones of turning a sacred history into soft-core pornography. Whether a historian should be the person to judge the literary merits of a work of fiction is an issue in itself. Shakespeare would have suffered horribly had his work been judged by historians. But Spellberg's judgment and Random House's statement that the novel "could incite acts of violence by a small radical segment" of the Muslim community became self-fulfilling prophecies. Before anyone had a chance to make up their own mind about how the author treated one of the greatest women in Islam, the subject had effectively been declared off-limits by Random House. Luckily, there are publishers who are not cowed by pre-emptive censorship. Martin Rynja, who runs Gibson Square, showed similar bravery by publishing Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, and Alexander Litvinenko's Blowing Up Russia. He may, in the minds of some readers, be damned for publishing Jones's novel, but never before has that injunction "publish and be damned" held truer.